Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley Series) [NOOK Book]

Overview

Featuring George Smiley, this New York Times bestseller is the first installment in John le Carr??s acclaimed Karla Trilogy. From the author of A Delicate Truth and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement?especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking ...

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This Book

Overview

Featuring George Smiley, this New York Times bestseller is the first installment in John le Carré’s acclaimed Karla Trilogy. From the author of A Delicate Truth and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The man he knew as "Control" is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn't quite ready for retirement—especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla—his Moscow Centre nemesis—and sets a trap to catch the traitor.

The Oscar-nominated feature film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and features Gary Oldman as Smiley, Academy Award winner Colin Firth (The King's Speech), and Tom Hardy (Inception).

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble ReviewTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which first appeared in 1974, is arguably Le Carré’s masterpiece and is surely one of the great spy novels of the 20th century. Loosely inspired by the career of Kim Philby, a Russian double agent who worked his way into the upper reaches of the British Secret Service, Tinker, Tailor tells the story of donnish, unprepossessing master spy George Smiley and his quest to identify the "mole" -- the deep-penetration agent -- who has turned Britain's Intelligence Service (commonly known as the Circus) inside out.

Rumors of the mole’s existence had circulated through the corridors of power for years and contributed to the disgrace -- and ultimate demise -- of "Control," Smiley’s mentor and the nameless former leader of the Circus. As the primary narrative opens, Smiley is recalled from his restless, unhappy retirement when a renegade British agent unearths corroborative evidence that the mole -- Code Name Gerald, identity unknown -- really does exist, and has sabotaged countless British intelligence initiatives and betrayed innumerable agents. In the face of all this, a panicked Whitehall minister enlists Smiley’s aid, charging him to "go backwards, go forwards, do whatever is necessary...to clean the stables," and to put the elusive Gerald out of business.

Internal evidence suggests that Gerald -- who is run by Smiley’s opposite number in Moscow Centre, the legendary Karla -- is one of four highly placed Circus officials: Percy Alleline, the slick, ambitious politician who has inherited Control’s position as Chief of Intelligence Operations; Roy Bland, a former left-wing intellectual recruited into the Service by Smiley himself; Toby Esterhase, a hard-edged Hungarian émigré with ambitions of his own; and Bill Haydon, a dashing, romantic figure -- the Circus’s own Lawrence of Arabia -- who was formerly the lover of Lady Ann Smiley, George’s promiscuous wife.

For all its inherent drama -- and this really is an enthralling novel -- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a quiet, leisurely, almost bloodless book, a hugely elaborate paper chase whose central investigation proceeds by means of interviews, research, and reflection. When he isn’t poring over the drab, endless documentation of the Circus bureaucracy, Smiley -- sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of former colleague Peter Guillam -- solicits the memories of a large cast of secondary characters, many of whom strayed uncomfortably close to the secret of Gerald’s existence and were punished accordingly. Included among them are Connie Sachs, an eccentric Oxford don and the former resident expert on Soviet Intelligence; Sam Collins, a Circus veteran who finds himself in the wrong place on the wrong night; and Jerry Westerby, a journalist and Circus irregular who will go on to serve as the eponymous hero of le Carré’s subsequent novel The Honourable Schoolboy. These and more than a dozen other supporting players are brought to life through the Dickensian flair for characterization that is one of le Carré’s most distinctive qualities.

In the end, two crucial Circus operations provide Smiley with the evidence he needs to unmask a traitor. One is Operation Witchcraft, which was designed to accommodate the nameless Russian source known as Merlin, whose steady stream of high-grade intelligence may be too good to be true. The other is Operation Testify, Control’s desperate, last-ditch attempt to identify the mole. Testify ended in disaster more than a year before the story begins, with Control discredited, the Circus disgraced, and a blindly loyal British agent named Jim Prideaux shot, captured, and nearly killed. Slowly, with great deliberation, Smiley picks up the threads of these very different operations and follows them through the labyrinth to a startling, but inevitable, revelation.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy may be the most influential, widely imitated spy novel of modern times. For years after its publication, an endless procession of novels dealing with the unmasking of Soviet moles flooded the marketplace. Some of them -- Len Deighton’s Berlin Game, Bryan Forbes’s The Endless Game, John Gardner’s The Garden of Weapons -- were actually rather good, but none of them came close to equaling le Carré’s achievement, which set an exacting, perhaps impossible, standard.

Le Carré’s many virtues -- his faultless deployment of atmosphere and language; his ability to convey the inner workings of an arcane, insular profession; his profligate sense of character; his profound grasp of the moral ambiguities endemic to life in "the secret world" -- are fully evident here, and seem as fresh and compelling today as they seemed more than 25 years ago. If you’ve never read this amazing book, I urge you to do so now. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a world-class entertainment and an important, enduring novel, one of the few legitimate classics to arise from its highly specialized field.

--Bill Sheehan

Wall Street Journal

A stunning story of espionage.

Time Magazine

One of the best tales of the year.

Newsweek

Le Carre is simply the world's greatest fictional spymaster.

San Francisco Chronicle

A rattling good novel.

Time

"The premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time."

The Wall Street Journal

"Stunning."

San Francisco Chronicle

"A rattling good novel."

Financial Times

"John le Carré is the great master of the spy story . . . the constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing."

Praise for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

“The premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time.”—Time

“A rattling good novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“John le Carré is the great master of the spy story…the constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing.”—Financial Times

“Stunning.”—Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

“The premier spy novelist of his time. Perhaps of all time.”—Time

“A rattling good novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“John le Carré is the great master of the spy story…the constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing.”—Financial Times

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

New York Times bestselling author John le Carré (A Delicate Truth and Spy Who Came in from the Cold) was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

First Chapter

Chapter One The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all. He came in mid-term without an interview -- late May, it was, though no one would have thought it from the weather -- employed through one of the shiftier agencies specialising in supply teachers for prep schools, to hold down old Dover's teaching till someone suitable could be found. "A linguist," Thursgood told the common-room, "a temporary measure," and brushed away his forelock in self-defence. "Priddo." He gave the spelling, "P-r-i-d" -- French was not Thursgood's subject so he consulted the slip of paper -- "e-a-u-x, first name James. I think he'll do us very well till July." The staff had no difficulty in reading the signals. Jim Prideaux was a poor white of the teaching community. He belonged to the same sad bunch as the late Mrs. Loveday, who had a Persian-lamb coat and stood in for junior divinity until her cheques bounced, or the late Mr. Maltby, the pianist who had been called from choir practice to help the police with their enquiries, and as far as anyone knew was helping them to this day, for Maltby's trunk still lay in the cellar awaiting instructions. Several of the staff, but chiefly Marjoribanks, were in favour of opening that trunk. They said it contained notorious missing treasures: Aprahamian's silver-framed picture of his Lebanese mother, for instance; Best-Ingram's Swiss army penknife and Matron's watch. But Thursgood set his creaseless face resolutely against their entreaties. Only five years had passed since he had inherited the school from his father, but they had taught him already that somethings are best locked away.

Jim Prideaux arrived on a Friday in a rainstorm. The rain rolled like gun-smoke down the brown combes of the Quantocks, then raced across the empty cricket fields into the sandstone of the crumbling façades. He arrived just after lunch, driving an old red Alvis and towing a second-hand trailer that had once been blue. Early afternoons at Thursgood's are tranquil, a brief truce in the running fight of each school day. The boys are sent to rest in their dormitories, the staff sit in the common-room over coffee reading newspapers or correcting boys' work. Thursgood reads a novel to his mother. Of the whole school, therefore, only little Bill Roach actually saw Jim arrive, saw the steam belching from the Alvis's bonnet as it wheezed its way down the pitted drive, windscreen wipers going full pelt and the trailer shuddering through the puddles in pursuit.

Roach was a new boy in those days and graded dull, if not actually deficient. Thursgood's was his second prep school in two terms. He was a fat round child with asthma, and he spent large parts of his rest kneeling on the end of his bed, gazing through the window. His mother lived grandly in Bath; his father was agreed to be the richest in the school, a distinction which cost the son dear. Coming from a broken home, Roach was also a natural watcher. In Roach's observation Jim did not stop at the school buildings but continued across the sweep to the stable yard. He knew the layout of the place already. Roach decided later that he must have made a reconnaissance or studied maps. Even when he reached the yard, he didn't stop but drove straight onto the wet grass, travelling at speed to keep the momentum. Then over the hummock into the Dip, head-first and out of sight. Roach half expected the trailer to jackknife on the brink, Jim took it over so fast, but instead it just lifted its tail and disappeared like a giant rabbit into its hole.

The Dip is a piece of Thursgood folklore. It lies in a patch of wasteland between the orchard, the fruit house, and the stable yard. To look at, it is no more than a depression in the ground, grass covered, with hummocks on the northern side, each about boy height and covered in tufted thickets which in summer grow spongy. It is these hummocks that give the Dip its special virtue as a playground and also its reputation, which varies with the fantasy of each new generation of boys. They are the traces of an open-cast silver mine, says one year, and digs enthusiastically for wealth. They are a Romano-British fort, says another, and stages battles with sticks and clay missiles. To others the Dip is a bomb-crater from the war and the hummocks are seated bodies buried in the blast. The truth is more prosaic. Six years ago, and not long before his abrupt elopement with a receptionist from the Castle Hotel, Thursgood's father had launched an appeal for a swimming pool and persuaded the boys to dig a large hole with a deep and a shallow end. But the money that came in was never quite enough to finance the ambition, so it was frittered away on other schemes, such as a new projector for the art school, and a plan to grow mushrooms in the school cellars. And even, said the cruel ones, to feather a nest for certain illicit lovers when they eventually took flight to Germany, the lady's native home.

Jim was unaware of these associations. The fact remains that by sheer luck he had chosen the one corner of Thursgood's academy which, as far as Roach was concerned, was endowed with supernatural properties.

Roach waited at the window but saw nothing more. Both the Alvis and the trailer were in dead ground, and if it hadn't been for the wet red tracks across the grass he might have wondered whether he had dreamed the whole thing. But the tracks were real, so when the bell went for the end of rest he put on his rubber boots and trudged through the rain to the top of the Dip and peered down, and there was Jim dressed in an army raincoat and a quite extraordinary hat, broadbrimmed like a safari hat but hairy, with one side pinned up in a rakish piratical curl and the water running off it like a gutter.

The Alvis was in the stable yard; Roach never knew how Jim spirited it out of the Dip, but the trailer was right down there, at what should have been the deep end, bedded on platforms of weathered brick, and Jim was sitting on the step drinking from a green plastic beaker, and rubbing his right shoulder as if he had banged it on something, while the rain poured off his hat. Then the hat lifted and Roach found himself staring at an extremely fierce red face, made still fiercer by the shadow of the brim and by a brown moustache washed into fangs by the rain. The rest of the face was criss-crossed with jagged cracks, so deep and crooked that Roach concluded in another of his flashes of imaginative genius that Jim had once been very hungry in a tropical place and filled up again since. The left arm still lay across his chest, the right shoulder was still drawn high against his neck. But the whole tangled shape of him was stock-still, he was like an animal frozen against its background: a stag, thought Roach, on a hopeful impulse; something noble.

"Who the hell are you?" asked a very military voice.

"Sir, Roach, sir. I'm a new boy."

For a moment longer, the brick face surveyed Roach from the shadow of the hat. Then, to his intense relief, its features relaxed into a wolfish grin, the left hand, still clapped over the right shoulder, resumed its slow massage while at the same time he managed a long pull from the plastic beaker.

"New boy, eh?" Jim repeated into the beaker, still grinning. "Well, that's a lucky break, I will say."

Rising now, and turning his crooked back on Roach, Jim set to work on what appeared to be a detailed study of the trailer's four legs, a very critical study that involved much rocking of the suspension, and much tilting of the strangely garbed head, and the emplacement of several bricks at different angles and points. Meanwhile the spring rain was clattering down on everything: his coat, his hat, and the roof of the old trailer. And Roach noticed that throughout these manoeuvres Jim's right shoulder had not budged at all but stayed wedged high against his neck like a rock under the mackintosh. Therefore he wondered whether Jim was a sort of giant hunchback and whether all hunch backs hurt as Jim's did. And he noticed as a generality, a thing to store away, that people with bad backs take long strides; it was something to do with balance.

"New boy, eh? Well, I'm not a new boy," Jim went on, in altogether a much more friendly tone, as he pulled at a leg of the trailer. "I'm an old boy. Old as Rip van Winkle, if you want to know. Older. Got any friends?"

"No, sir," said Roach simply, in the listless tone that schoolboys always use for saying "no," leaving all positive response to their interrogators. Jim, however, made no response at all, so that Roach felt an odd stirring of kinship suddenly, and of hope.

With that, in a manner of speaking, the introduction was made. Jim did not tell Roach to go away, so Roach stayed on the brow peering downward through his rain-smeared spectacles. The bricks, he noticed with awe, were pinched from the cucumber frame. Several had been loose already and Jim must have loosened them a bit more. It seemed a wonderful thing to Roach that anyone just arrived at Thursgood's should be so self-possessed as to pinch the actual fabric of the school for his own purposes, and doubly wonderful that Jim had run a lead off the hydrant for his water, for that hydrant was the subject of a special school rule: to touch it at all was a beatable offence.

"Hey, you, Bill. You wouldn't have such a thing as a marble on you, by any chance?"

"A, sir, what, sir?" Roach asked, patting his pockets in a dazed way.

"Marble, old boy. Round glass marble, little ball. Don't boys play marbles any more? We did when I was at school."

Roach had no marble, but Aprahamian had had a whole collection flown in from Beirut. It took Roach about fifty seconds to race back to the school, secure one against the wildest undertakings, and return panting to the Dip. There he hesitated, for in his mind the Dip was already Jim's and Roach required leave to descend it. But Jim had disappeared into the trailer, so, having waited a moment, Roach stepped gingerly down the bank and offered the marble through the doorway. Jim didn't spot him at once. He was sipping from the beaker and staring out the window at the black clouds as they tore this way and that over the Quantocks. This sipping movement, Roach noticed, was actually quite difficult, for Jim could not easily swallow standing up straight; he had to tilt his whole twisted trunk backward to achieve the angle. Meanwhile the rain came on really hard again, rattling against the trailer like gravel.

"Sir," said Roach, but Jim made no move.

"Trouble with an Alvis is, no damn springs," said Jim at last, more to the window than to his visitor. "You drive along with your rump on the white line, eh? Cripple anybody." And, tilting his trunk again, he drank.

"Yes, sir," said Roach, much surprised that Jim should assume he was a driver.

Jim had taken off his hat. His sandy hair was close-cropped; there were patches where someone had gone too low with the scissors. These patches were mainly on one side, so that Roach guessed that Jim had cut the hair himself with his good arm, which made him even more lopsided.

"I brought you a marble," said Roach.

"Very good of you. Thanks, old boy." Taking the marble, he slowly rolled it round his hard, powdery palm, and Roach knew at once that he was very skillful at all sorts of things; that he was the kind of man who lived on terms with tools and objects generally. "Not level, you see, Bill," he confided, still intent upon the marble. "Skewy. Like me. Watch," and turned purposefully to the larger window. A strip of aluminium beading ran along the bottom, put there to catch the condensation. Laying the marble in it, Jim watched it roll to the end and fall on the floor.

"Skewy," he repeated. "Listing in the stern. Can't have that, can we? Hey, hey, where d'you get to, you little brute?"

The trailer was not a homey place, Roach noticed, stooping to retrieve the marble. It might have belonged to anyone, though it was scrupulously clean. A bunk, a kitchen chair, a ship's stove, a calor gas cylinder. Not even a picture of his wife, thought Roach, who had not yet met a bachelor, with the exception of Mr. Thursgood. The only personal things he could find were a webbing kit-bag hanging from the door, a set of sewing things stored beside the bunk, and a homemade shower made from a perforated biscuit tin and neatly welded to the roof. And on the table one bottle of colourless drink, gin or vodka, because that was what his father drank when Roach went to his flat for weekends in the holidays.

"East-west looks okay, but north-south is undoubtedly skewy," Jim declared, testing the other window ledge. "What are you good at, Bill?"

"I don't know, sir," said Roach woodenly.

"Got to be good at something, surely; everyone is. How about football? Are you good at football, Bill?"

"No, sir," said Roach.

"Are you a grind, then?" Jim asked carelessly, as he lowered himself with a short grunt onto the bed and took a pull from the beaker. "You don't look a grind, I must say," he added politely. "Although you're a loner."

"I don't know," Roach repeated, and moved half a pace towards the open door.

"What's your best thing, then?" He took another long sip. "Must be good at something, Bill; everyone is. My best thing was ducks and drakes. Cheers."

Now this was an unfortunate question to ask of Roach just then, for it occupied most of his waking hours. Indeed he had recently come to doubt whether he had any purpose on earth at all. In work and play he considered himself seriously inadequate; even the daily routine of the school, such as making his bed and tidying his clothes, seemed to be beyond his reach. Also he lacked piety: old Mrs. Thursgood had told him so; he screwed up his face too much at chapel. He blamed himself very much for these shortcomings, but most of all he blamed himself for the break-up of his parents' marriage, which he should have seen coming and taken steps to prevent. He even wondered whether he was more directly responsible; whether, for instance, he was abnormally wicked or divisive or slothful, and that his bad character had wrought the rift. At his last school he had tried to explain this by screaming, and feigning fits of cerebral palsy, which his aunt had. His parents conferred, as they frequently did in their reasonable way, and changed his school. Therefore this chance question, levelled at him in the cramped trailer by a creature at least halfway to divinity -- a fellow solitary, at that -- brought him suddenly very near disaster. He felt the heat charging to his face; he watched his spectacles mist over and the trailer begin to dissolve into a sea of grief. Whether Jim noticed this, Roach never knew, for suddenly he had turned his crooked back on him, moved away to the table, and was helping himself from the plastic beaker while he threw out saving phrases.

"You're a good watcher, anyway, I'll tell you that for nothing, old boy. Us singles always are -- no one to rely on, what? Nobody else spotted me. Gave me a real turn up there, parked on the horizon. Thought you were a juju man. Best watcher in the unit, Bill Roach is, I'll bet. Long as he's got his specs on. What?"

"Yes," Roach agreed gratefully, "I am."

"Well, you stay here and watch, then," Jim commanded, clapping the safari hat back on his head, "and I'll slip outside and trim the legs. Do that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where's damn marble?"

"Here, sir."

"Call out when she moves, right? North, south, whichever way she rolls. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Know which way's north?"

"That way," said Roach promptly, and struck out his arm at random.

"Right. Well, you call when she rolls," Jim repeated, and disappeared into the rain. A moment later, Roach felt the ground swaying under his feet and heard another roar either of pain or anger, as Jim wrestled with a recalcitrant leg.

In the course of that same summer term, the boys paid Jim the compliment of a nickname. They had several shots before they were happy. They tried "Trooper," which caught the bit of military in him, his occasional, quite harmless cursing, and his solitary rambles in the Quantocks. All the same, "Trooper" didn't stick, so they tried "Pirate" and for a while "Goulash." "Goulash" because of his taste for hot food, the smell of curries and onions and paprika that greeted them in warm puffs as they filed past the Dip on their way to evensong. "Goulash" for his perfect French, which was held to have a slushy quality. Spikely, of Five B, could imitate it to a hair: "You heard the question, Berger. What is Emile looking at?" -- a convulsive jerk of the right hand -- "Don't gawp at me, old boy, I'm not a juju man. Qu'est-ce qu'il regarde, Emile dans le tableau que tu as sous le nez? Mon cher Berger, if you do not very soon summon one lucid sentence of French, je te mettrai tout de suite à la porte, tu comprends, you beastly toad?"

But these terrible threats were never carried out, either in French or in English. In a quaint way, they actually added to the aura of gentleness which quickly surrounded him, a gentleness only possible in big men seen through the eyes of boys.

Yet "Goulash" did not satisfy them, either. It lacked the hint of strength contained. It took no account of Jim's passionate Englishness, which was the only subject where he could be relied on to waste time. Toad Spikely had only to venture one disparaging comment on the monarchy, extol the joys of some foreign country, preferably a hot one, for Jim to colour sharply and snap out a good three minutes' worth on the privilege of being born an Englishman. He knew they were teasing him but he was unable not to rise. Often he ended his homily with a rueful grin, and muttered references to red herrings, and red faces too, when certain people would have to come in for extra work and miss their football. But England was his love; when it came down to it, no one suffered for her.

Spikely did not, so Jim seized a crayon and drew a globe. To the west, America, he said, full of greedy fools fouling up their inheritance. To the east, China-Russia; he drew no distinction: boiler suits, prison camps, and a damn long march to nowhere. In the middle...

Finally they hit on "Rhino."

Partly this was a play on "Prideaux," partly a reference to his taste for living off the land and his appetite for physical exercise, which they noted constantly. Shivering in the shower queue first thing in the morning, they would see the Rhino pounding down Combe Lane with a rucksack on his crooked back as he returned from his morning march. Going to bed, they could glimpse his lonely shadow through the plastic roof of the fives court as the Rhino tirelessly attacked the concrete wall. And sometimes, on warm evenings, from their dormitory windows they would covertly watch him at golf, which he played with a dreadful old iron, zigzagging across the playing fields, often after reading to them from an extremely English adventure book: Biggles, Percy Westerman, or Jeffrey Farnol, grabbed haphazard from the dingy library. At each stroke they waited for the grunt as he started his backswing, and they were seldom disappointed. They kept a meticulous score. At the staff cricket match he made twenty-five before dismissing himself with a ball deliberately lofted to Spikely at square leg. "Catch, toad, catch it -- go on. Well done, Spikely, good lad -- that's what you're there for."

He was also credited, despite his taste for tolerance, with a sound understanding of the criminal mind. There were several examples of this, but the most telling occurred a few days before the end of term, when Spikely discovered in Jim's waste-basket a draft of the next day's examination paper, and rented it to candidates at five new pence a time. Several boys paid their shilling and spent an agonised night memorising answers by torchlight in their dormitories. But when the exam came round Jim presented a quite different paper.

"You can look at this one for nothing," he bellowed as he sat down. And, having hauled open his Daily Telegraph, he calmly gave himself over to the latest counsels of the juju men, which they understood to mean almost anyone with intellectual pretension, even if he wrote in the Queen's cause.

There was lastly the incident of the owl, which had a separate place in their opinion of him, since it involved death, a phenomenon to which children react variously. The weather continuing cold, Jim brought a bucket of coal to his classroom and one Wednesday lit it in the grate, and sat there with his back to the warmth, reading a dictée. First some soot fell, which he ignored; then the owl came down, a full-sized barn owl which had nested up there, no doubt, through many unswept winters and summers of Dover's rule, and was now smoked out, dazed and black from beating itself to exhaustion in the flue. It fell over the coals and collapsed in a heap on the wooden floorboard with a clatter and a scuffle, then lay like an emissary of the devil, hunched but breathing, wings stretched, staring straight out at the boys through the soot that caked its eyes. There was no one who was not frightened; even Spikely, a hero, was frightened. Except for Jim, who had in a second folded the beast together and taken it out the door without a word. They heard nothing, though they listened like stowaways, till the sound of running water from down the corridor as Jim evidently washed his hands. "He's having a pee," said Spikely, which earned a nervous laugh. But as they filed out of the classroom they discovered the owl still folded, neatly dead and awaiting burial, on top of the compost heap beside the Dip. Its neck, as the braver ones established, was snapped. Only a gamekeeper, declared Sudeley, who had one, would know how to kill an owl so well.

Among the rest of the Thursgood community, opinion regarding Jim was less unanimous. The ghost of Mr. Maltby, the pianist, died hard. Matron, siding with Bill Roach, pronounced him heroic and in need of care: it was a miracle he managed with that back. Marjoribanks said he had been run over by a bus when he was drunk. It was Marjoribanks also, at the staff match where Jim so excelled, who pointed out the sweater. Marjoribanks was not a cricketer but he had strolled down to watch with Thursgood.

"Do you think that sweater's kosher," he asked in a high, jokey voice, "or do you think he pinched it?"

"Leonard, that's very unfair," Thursgood scolded, hammering at the flanks of his Labrador. "Bite him, Ginny, bite the bad man."

By the time he reached his study, however, Thursgood's laughter had quite worn off and he became extremely nervous. Bogus Oxford men he could deal with, just as in his time he had known classics masters who had no Greek and parsons who had no divinity. Such men, confronted with proof of their deception, broke down and wept and left, or stayed on half-pay. But men who withheld genuine accomplishment -- these were a breed he had not met but he knew already that he did not like them. Having consulted the university calendar, he telephoned the agency -- a Mr. Stroll, of the house of Stroll & Medley.

"What precisely do you want to know?" Mr. Stroll asked with a dreadful sigh.

"Well, nothing precisely." Thursgood's mother was sewing at a sampler and seemed not to hear. "Merely that if one asks for a written curriculum vitae one likes it to be complete. One doesn't like gaps. Not if one pays one's fee."

At this point Thursgood found himself wondering rather wildly whether he had woken Mr. Stroll from a deep sleep to which he had now returned.

"Very patriotic bloke," Mr. Stroll observed finally.

"I did not employ him for his patriotism."

"He's been in dock," Mr. Stroll whispered on, as if through frightful draughts of cigarette smoke. "Laid up. Spinal."

"Quite so. But I assume he has not been in hospital for the whole of the last twenty-five years. Touché," he murmured to his mother, his hand over the mouthpiece, and once more it crossed his mind that Mr. Stroll had dropped off to sleep.

"You've only got him till the end of term," Mr. Stroll breathed. "If you don't fancy him, chuck him out. You asked for temporary, temporary's what you've got. You said cheap, you've got cheap."

"That's as may be," Thursgood retorted gamely. "But I've paid you a twenty-guinea fee; my father dealt with you for many years and I'm entitled to certain assurances. You've put here -- may I read it to you? -- you've put here: 'Before his injury, various overseas appointments of a commercial and prospecting nature.' Now that is hardly an enlightening description of a lifetime's employment, is it?"

At her sewing his mother nodded her agreement. "It is not," she echoed aloud.

"That's my first point. Let me go on a little."

"Not too much, darling," warned his mother.

"I happen to know he was up at Oxford in 1938. Why didn't he finish? What went wrong?"

"I seem to recall there was an interlude round about then," said Mr. Stroll after another age. "But I expect you're too young to remember it."

"He can't have been in prison all the time," said his mother after a very long silence, still without looking up from her sewing.

"He's been somewhere," said Thursgood morosely, staring across the windswept gardens towards the Dip.

All through the summer holidays, as he moved uncomfortably between one household and another, embracing and rejecting, Bill Roach fretted about Jim: whether his back was hurting; what he was doing for money now that he had no one to teach and only half a term's pay to live on; worst of all, whether he would be there when the new term began, for Bill had a feeling he could not describe that Jim lived so precariously on the world's surface that he might at any time fall off it into a void; he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on. He rehearsed the circumstances of their first meeting, and in particular Jim's enquiry regarding friendship, and he had a holy terror that just as he had failed his parents in love, so he had failed Jim, largely owing to the disparity in their ages. And that therefore Jim had moved on and was already looking somewhere else for a companion, scanning other schools with his pale eyes. He imagined also that, like himself, Jim had had a great attachment that had failed him and that he longed to replace. But here Bill Roach's speculation met a dead end: he had no idea how adults loved each other.

There was so little he could do that was practical. He consulted a medical book and interrogated his mother about hunchbacks and he longed but did not dare to steal a bottle of his father's vodka and take it back to Thursgood's as a lure. And when at last his mother's chauffeur dropped him at the hated steps, he did not pause to say goodbye but ran for all he was worth to the top of the Dip, and there to his immeasurable joy was Jim's trailer in its same spot at the bottom, a shade dirtier than before, and a fresh patch of earth beside it, he supposed for winter vegetables. And Jim sitting on the step, grinning up at him as if he had heard Bill coming and got the grin of welcome ready before he appeared at the brink.

That same term, Jim invented a nickname for Roach. He dropped "Bill" and called him "Jumbo" instead. He gave no reason for this and Roach, as is common in the case of christenings, was in no position to object. In return, Roach appointed himself Jim's guardian; a regent-guardian was how he thought of the appointment; a stand-in replacing Jim's departed friend, whoever that friend might be.

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Is There a Mole Deep Within the Circus?

George Smiley and Control,the head of the Circus, have been disgraced and removed from Her Majesty's Secret Sercvice (A.K.A. The Circus)With a new group of bright young men running the operation, the quality of the Circus's product (Secret Information) has never been better or more consistent. But maybe that's the problem. Is the Circus's product just a little too good to be true? Information sufaces from a renegade Circus agent in Hong Kong that causes the very highest man of the Secret Service to look over his shoulder for fear of a mole. (A mole is a double agent planted deep in Circus's fabric by the Soviet Union.) George Smiley is called back from his forced retirement to root out the mole. You can't put the book down until you have reached the last page.

11 out of 12 people found this review helpful.

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rdbks

Posted January 7, 2012

Highly recommended

I decided to reread this thriller because of the new movie version. I found the book as thrilling as the first time I read it. And I was glad I had reread it as it helped the movie make sense to me (and my friends whom having not read the book, needed some gaps filled in).

10 out of 11 people found this review helpful.

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A Well Written Crescendo

I’ve only ever read one book from John le Carre before, and it’s entirely possible that The Mission Song is not representative of the rest of the author’s writing, but I was not expecting this book to be as good as it was. The skill with which Mr. le Carre worked this story into being is nothing short of amazing. The entire book feels like it was one big crescendo, building anticipation and constantly working toward a closing note that sounds resiliently. This is a book that I’ll definitely be suggesting to customers when they come in asking for a book to read, and I’ll also be seeking out some other books written by John le Carre. 4/5

7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted February 20, 2002

Le Carre Shoots and Scores

This was an absolutely marvelous book. Intriguing and clever, Le Carre deftly takes you through the role of George Smiley and the mysterious Karla. More twists than a roller coaster, it never gets boring. This is one book that should be preserved through history.

7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 1, 2012

Not if your looking for an action packed thrill ride

Found this to be an intriguing book, but this was not like many of the spy novels I typically read. You know the ones where you are quickly flipping through the pages to find out what happens next. If you are looking for a bit of action, this is not for you. If you are looking for a thinker novel, then dive in.

Interested in seeing the movie. If it's close to the book, I'll definitely be renting it.

4 out of 8 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted February 28, 2012

First Book in a Great Trilogy

Highly recommend reading or rereading this absorbing trio of books: Tinker Taylor, The Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. These books offer insight into the Cold War period, particularly because they were written during the 1970s, only a decade or so before the fall of the Soviet Union and the toppling of the Berlin Wall. George Smiley and team are an engaging, if somewhat enigmatic group, and the complexity of the plots are quite enjoyable.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 7, 2012

Great

Read it, you won't be disappointed

3 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 26, 2011

Gave up

I am not the most sophisticated of readers, but this was impossible to follow and I gave up on it half way through. Too much mental exercise.

3 out of 20 people found this review helpful.

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SeamusRyan

Posted April 13, 2009

Excellent book!

Le Carre amazes me with how he develops and integrates his characters. He not only writes about the spy story but covers each of his characters with a very human brush.
If one has ever followed the machinations of the Cold War this is a very real picture.

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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Arctic-Stranger

Posted March 7, 2012

I first read this book in the 1980s, and enjoyed it immensely th

I first read this book in the 1980s, and enjoyed it immensely then. I just saw the recent movie, and went back to reread it, and was pleased to see it was as good as I remembered. LeCarre is the antidote to Ian Fleming. His characters are plodding, methodical but every bit as competent at what they do as the glitzy Mr. Bond.

This is not an action novel, but it is a wonderful read.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted November 18, 2013

A fantastic book. Great characters, lot of tension, and wonderfu

A fantastic book. Great characters, lot of tension, and wonderful twists. Le Carre is a master storyteller.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted May 9, 2013

Love this author and this book!

I read this book when it was first published and was blown away. My personal library contains all of his books which I continue to reread. If you enjoy a good spy novel this book is for you. Check out his other books they are also keepers. I really like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, another awesome book.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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rab650r

Posted April 4, 2012

I found this book to be outrageously dull. Apparently being a s

I found this book to be outrageously dull. Apparently being a spy is about as exciting as being an accountant, or any other mid-level employee for a large business: go through files, attend meetings, go through more files, take notes, etc. The main drag on this book is that there is no sense of urgency whatsoever. Yes, there is a Soviet mole inside British intelligence, but while the protagonist obviously has an interest in finding out who, there is no reason to rush. What will happen if he doesn't find out soon? Will the British lose some top-secret info? WIll the mole goad both sides into war? Is the mole about to escape, so they have to find him soon? Apparently not. The good guys aren't working against the clock, so my reaction as events unfold was largely &quot;So what?&quot;

Another gripe, the author likes to throw out spy terms as if you know what they mean and only chooses to explain them (if at all) several chapters later, which makes this book hard to follow, in addition to boring.

1 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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lacb

Posted February 20, 2012

highly recommend

it was one of the best spy books that i have read.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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SgtWalt

Posted February 6, 2012

Tinker, Tailer Soldier, Spy.

The book is set to correspond with the Kim Philby affair in Great Britian. Although fiction, there are a great many paralles as to how Philby might have been caught. It is a good book for any one who likes spy thrillersd.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Fafhrd

Posted January 26, 2012

Interesting read

I liked the book but found it hard to follow at times. Like others the story line jumps around from the present to the past back to the present with a jump or two to the past. Gives the story line weight but makes it hard to know just where everything is at any given moment.

Read the book and then saw the BBC production. The DVD's are EXACTLY like the book except for minor changes in the timeline.

Good reading but you have to stay on top of when you are.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Manmage

Posted January 22, 2012

Needs patience, but worth the read

Thick plot, slow paced. Could get confusing with the story line switching back and forth in time, but that keeps the suspense and makes the plot a jigsaw puzzle. The ending however is abrupt.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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ft14051

Posted January 2, 2012

Thriller

I enjoyed every morsel as I read them. Can't wait to read more Le Carre.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 3, 2014

Jules

Gosh..

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted January 1, 2014

Sam

Hello?

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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